Mortimer William Pomerance (August 2, 1905 – January 12, 1995) was an American animator who worked for
Walt Disney Studios. He worked first as a business manager of cartoonists, and then was a business agent for the
Screen Actors Guild
The Screen Actors Guild (SAG) was an American labor union which represented over 100,000 film and television principal and background performers worldwide. On March 30, 2012, the union leadership announced that the SAG membership voted to me ...
. After the
Disney strike of 1941, Pomerance and
David Hilberman left Disney and started their own animation show studio, TEMPO.
Walt Disney
Walter Elias Disney (; December 5, 1901December 15, 1966) was an American animator, film producer and entrepreneur. A pioneer of the American animation industry, he introduced several developments in the production of cartoons. As a film p ...
accused Pomerance, along with
Herbert Sorrell and
David Hilberman, of being a communist in an interview with chief investigator
Robert E. Stripling before the
House Un-American Activities Committee
The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA), popularly dubbed the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), was an investigative United States Congressional committee, committee of the United States House of Representatives, create ...
, although Disney said in the interview that "No one has any way of proving" this.
On 5 February 1952, Pomerance appeared before the HUAC. He refused to answer whether he had been a member of the Communist Party by taking the
5th Amendment.
He was born in
Manhattan
Manhattan (), known regionally as the City, is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the five boroughs of New York City. The borough is also coextensive with New York County, one of the original counties of the U.S. state ...
, the first-born son of Jewish immigrants Harry Pomerance and Esther Perlstein, both from Russia. He died in
Madison, Connecticut
Madison is a town in the southeastern corner of New Haven County, Connecticut, United States, occupying a central location on Connecticut's Long Island Sound shoreline. The population was 17,691 at the 2020 census.
Madison was first settled in 16 ...
in 1995.
[''Connecticut Death Index, 1949-2012'']
References
1905 births
1995 deaths
People from Manhattan
Walt Disney Animation Studios people
American animators
20th-century American Jews
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